Artifact

When we launched Artifact, we expected it would be the beginning of a long journey, that it would lay the foundation for years to come. Our plan was to immediately dive into our normal strategy of shipping a series of updates driven by the dialogue community members were having with each other and with us.

Obviously, things didn't turn out how we hoped. Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome. But we don't think that players misunderstand our game, or that they're playing it wrong. Artifact now represents an opportunity for us to improve our craft and use that knowledge to build better games.

Since launch, we've been looking carefully at how players interact with the game as well as gathering feedback. It has become clear that there are deep-rooted issues with the game and that our original update strategy of releasing new features and cards would be insufficient to address them. Instead, we believe the correct course of action is to take larger steps, to re-examine the decisions we've made along the way regarding game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more.

So what does this mean?

Moving forward, we'll be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates. While we expect this process of experimentation and development to take a significant amount of time, we’re excited to tackle this challenge and will get back to you as soon as we are ready.

Added Random Two Color deck option for private lobbies and tournaments. This gives both players different randomized 2-color decks in each match.

Added Speed Timer option for private lobbies and tournaments. This allows players 10 seconds to take each action.

Automated Open Tournaments are now 'Chaos Blitz'. Chaos Blitz is Random Two Color, Speed Timer, 8 player free-for-all lasting for 1 hour and 30 minutes

Bug Fixes & Other Changes:

Hovering gold in the HUD displays the amount of gold spent but not yet revealed through playing items (this is a clue rather than an exact amount because of hidden information with Hold, Shop Deed, etc.)